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Fringe: Inner Child

By fred | April 8, 2009

(S01E15) It seems like months, doesn’t it? Maybe because it’s actually been two months since we last saw an episode of Fringe, two long month away from our eyes! That’s an awfully long time, and we all know how much such (long) hiatus can deeply hurt a show. Of course it still has a very strong lead-in so hopefully the ratings will remain stable.

The wait was long, but worth it. This episode was not like most of the past episodes of the show, it was a standalone episode that didn’t follow the usual formula most episodes are based on, it felt different and, as far as I’m concerned, better. I really liked this episode, and maybe it’s me being happy to finally get the show back on TV, but I’m willing to call this (one of) the best episode of the series yet.

Yes, that much. I know many are fans of the whole serialized plot with Massive Dynamics and that whole Pattern thing that runs in the back, but I was never a fan of that mythology and for a long time I hoped writers of the show would finally managed to do what they always claimed they wanted the show to be, and to deliver strong, interesting and exciting episodes that don’t need to tackle aspects of serialization and the ongoing mythology to succeed.

Of course, one could say this episode did eventually go there, but that’s only an added bonus, as it also works on a completely self-contained format. I liked this episode from the beginning, and an opening scene that felt closer to The X Files than anything we usually see on Fringe. By that I mean, there was a mystery, and secret place discovered inside an old building and a weird kid living in there.

We didn’t know nothing about the kid, and it pretty much stayed that way all along. It wasn’t an obvious science experiment as it usually is, it didn’t had any (direct) connection to MD or Walter’s past work, no instead it was just a case of the unknown. An explainable fact that needed investigation, a mystery that needed to be solved, and Walter’s crazy (and, as he hilariously reminded, superior) mind was only a tool to try to understand.

Now I don’t doubt many of you saw the connection very early on. A bald kid, who has a strong emotional connection to people, who doesn’t talk, who can understand everything and write upside down without even looking at the paper, it was one of them. Whoever the people of the Observer are, from the future, from another planet, from another dimension, he was one of them.

I’ll be honest, it wasn’t until he was starring at the actual Observer that I finally made the connection. It might have been rather obvious, but that never clicked for me. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t. Looking back though, it should have, and not just for me. I can see Walter not seeing it, despite his previous encounters with the Observer, who became a friend. I guess he’s crazy enough to forget where he put his turntable, his teleportation device, or that Peter just told him Olivia was there wand wanted to see him seconds ago.

We know his memory isn’t exactly working as expected, so I can excuse him. But Peter, after the weird face-to-face moment he had with the Observer, or Olivia who’s always so good at making the darkest connections - as she did when she first spotted the Observer IIRC – for them, looking back, it just doesn’t make sense that no one, at any time, didn’t just mention it and wondered: could there be a link, between this kid and our bald friend The Observer ??

On the same note, the second he walked in, I knew that Eliot Michaels wasn’t working with social services, and the way the kid kept being scared of him was clearly a major hint, so again it’s odd Olivia didn’t pick up on that herself.

But still, I really liked this episode. It had an interesting story, I liked the lack of obvious science experiment or connection to MD or Walter’s previous work, and it was filled with lots of great moments, whether it was Olivia and the kid, Walter and his crazy ways, including the awesome dance with that thing he wanted to put on the kid’s head, or Olivia kicking that killer’s ass in the end.

(By the way, when we first saw the “invitation” sent to the FBI, the one Charlie got before calling Olivia, anyone else thought it was in direct connection to the kid? I did, I thought that puppet or whatever looked close enough…)

A very good episode, and one that can even extend to later episode as I’m sure it will, because apparently it wasn’t the first “Observer Kid” that was found by the CIA, and at some point this will surely come back.

What did everybody else think?

Posted in Reviews
Shows: Fringe